2024/07/11 by Karla Schäfer, Schäfer, Karla, Jeongeun Choi +5
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Misinformation and Its Impacts
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2407.08417
openalex publication_date 2024/07/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Topic modeling is frequently being used for analysing large text corpora such as news articles or social media data. BERTopic, consisting of sentence embedding, dimension reduction, clustering, and topic extraction, is the newest and currently the SOTA topic modeling method. However, current topic modeling methods have room for improvement because, as unsupervised methods, they require careful tuning and selection of hyperparameters, e.g., for dimension reduction and clustering. This paper aims to analyse the technical application of BERTopic in practice. For this purpose, it compares and selects different methods and hyperparameters for each stage of BERTopic through density based clustering validation and six different topic coherence measures. Moreover, it also aims to analyse the results of topic modeling on real world data as a use case. For this purpose, the German fake news dataset (GermanFakeNCovid) on Covid-19 was created by us and in order to experiment with topic modeling in a multilingual (English and German) setting combined with the FakeCovid dataset. With the final results, we were able to determine thematic similarities between the United States and Germany. Whereas, distinguishing the topics of fake news from India proved to be more challenging.